This article about the “controversy” over reclassifying humans or chimps because of their close relationship (chimps are closer to humans than gorillas in genetic distance) is pretty stupid-this is old news [1]. Sounds to me a bit like the bruhaha over reclassifying Pluto from a planet to a planetesimal or whatever-who really cares?
On the other hand this also shows why racial cladistics is so hard, it’s tricky enough when you have species to figure out on what basis to classify them. A chimp and a gorilla (at least Common Chimpanzees and Lowland Gorillas) probably overlap phenotypically (skeletal structure from large chimps to small gorillas) more than either does with humans, and yet the lineage evidence indicates that chimps & humans are closer together….
[1] An evangelical Christian friend of mine refused to believed that chimps & humans were more than 95% congruent genetically (99% by some methods)-so it’s not old news to everyone.
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